Abbi Jacobson and Ilana Glazer play best friends on TV, on a sitcom called “Broad City.” They are its creators, head writers, and stars. Their characters, named Abbi and Ilana, are twenty-something stoners in New York—broke, horny, heedless, daffy, mostly benign, occasionally brilliant—who work crappy jobs, bump around town, get into mischief, and, with genial vulgarity and dirtbag charm, accidentally complicate their lives. Their manager initially pitched the show to the networks as “ ‘Laverne and Shirley’ meets ‘Louie,’ ” and it’s likely that somewhere along the line someone described it as a women’s “Workaholics,” or a chicks’ Cheech and Chong. Like anything, it owes debts to much that has come before, but it also offers something that, oddly, seems to be new, and that, to its legions of fans, is deemed long overdue: an unpretentious portrait of a friendship between women in which they don’t undermine each other or fret over how they look or define themselves by whom they’re sleeping with. The love affair at the heart of the show is between Abbi and Ilana. It’s more or less platonic—so far.
This “bra-mance,” as it has been called, is based on Jacobson and Glazer’s real-life friendship, and on the misadventures they’ve had together, or have witnessed or imagined, as they’ve tried to make it in New York. They are a funny kind of Millennial duo, a Comden and Green for the Instagram age. Jacobson is thirty now, and Glazer is twenty-seven, and they often say that their characters are essentially their younger selves, who they were before “Broad City” came along—before purpose, responsibility, hard work, money, and acclaim.
“Broad City” started as a Web series. Jacobson and Glazer made thirty-three episodes, each a few minutes long, and built a cult following online. Last year, they developed the series into a full-fledged TV program for Comedy Central. The first season, consisting of ten half-hour episodes, ended in March. (The next season, which they have just finished writing, shoots this summer and should air early next year.) The enthusiastic response—rave reviews, an average of 1.3 million viewers per episode, and about that many posts on BuzzFeed—seems to arise not only from the calibre of the comedy but also from the apparent authenticity of the women’s affection for each other. People find themselves wanting to be Abbi’s and Ilana’s friends, too—“to live inside that secret-handshake vernacular,” as Carrie Brownstein, the co-creator of “Portlandia,” a distant cousin of “Broad City,” wrote in a tweet.
Glazer says that the characters are fifteen-per-cent exaggerations of themselves. In some respects, this understates the embellishment. To create and sustain a show like this, you have to have it together in a way that the characters Abbi and Ilana do not. Comedy is hard work, and hard work isn’t good comedy. An Emmy aspirant cannot, as Ilana does at the fictional office of Deals Deals Deals, slip away from her desk, retrieve a one-hitter from behind a tile in a bathroom stall, smoke, then curl up on a toilet and nap away the afternoon. Jacobson and Glazer aren’t the first comedians to impersonate some younger, poorer, less competent version of themselves (see Lucy, Liz Lemon, Louie), but sometimes it can be hard for viewers, to say nothing of the comedians themselves, to differentiate.
In other respects, the fifteen-per-cent number seems right, insofar as “Broad City” depends more than anything on the women’s personalities and on the chemistry between them. “The rule is: Specific voices are funny, and chemistry can’t be faked,” Amy Poehler, the show’s executive producer, told me. “There’s something about them that’s really watchable and organic and interesting. There aren’t enough like them on TV: confident, sexually active, self-effacing women, girlfriends who love each other the most.” There are, of course, the girls on “Girls,” the show that serves as “Broad City” ’s most widely cited touchstone, but one might argue that the “Girls” girls lack both the self-effacement and the love. Abbi and Ilana embody the freedom, debauchery, ineptitude, and fellowship that people, particularly young women, must give up, or at least hide from view, in order to function as adults. The show is sneaky in the way it simultaneously celebrates and lampoons naïve impertinent Millennials, who are at once better than and unready for the adult world they are half-trying to join. Abbi and Ilana are the idols of a largely underserved and under-chronicled female id. Men have managed to get away with prolonged adolescence, on the screen and in life, in a way that women haven’t. “Women always have to be the eye rollers, as the men make a mess,” Poehler said. “We didn’t want that. Young women can be lost, too.”
The show has been credited for its “sneak-attack feminism,” with Abbi and Ilana as “femininjas.” The Los Angeles Review of Books put them in the tradition of “unruly women,” like Roseanne and Lucy: “Unruly women have unruly bodies—they’re too big for their clothes, their hair refuses to stay down. They talk too much, laugh too loudly, say things ladies shouldn’t. They fart and burp and poop; they make themselves known, refuse taming.” Abbi and Ilana do all this, but with an ease that absolves them of the lingering accusation, levelled elsewhere, that women comedians who work unclean are merely using shock to get attention—just trying to out-dude the dudes.
Ilana, on the show, is the wild one, the libertine. She doesn’t much care what people think. At work, in the cramped sales office of Deals Deals Deals, she is superlatively useless and cheerfully insubordinate. Wherever she is, she smokes tons of weed, tries out funny voices and facial expressions, dances and gesticulates to music that’s not there. She has a kind of nineties-trampy wardrobe of crop tops, minis, men’s briefs, and the so-called Ilana Glazer bra, which fans have traced to LF Stores, a clothing chain. Ilana has a semi-regular fuck-buddy arrangement with Lincoln, a responsible dentist played by Hannibal Buress, a Brooklyn standup comic. Lincoln wants more out of the relationship; Ilana does not. She tends instead to Abbi’s emotional needs, and tries to tempt her into a threesome, or a twosome.
Abbi, the character, is more vulnerable, self-doubting, and vestigially square. She bumbles her way through a crush on a handsome neighbor and endures the offenses of a roommate’s foul, freeloading boyfriend, Bevers, played by John Gemberling, the co-creator of the series “Fat Guy Stuck in Internet.” She puts a Post-it on her vibrator as a reminder to masturbate. She works as a janitor at a fancy gym, unclogging toilets and dealing with the occasional “pube situation,” but aspires to be a trainer. Still, she has spells of benevolent derangement and jubilant self-assertion. She can suddenly light up with the swagger of R. Crumb’s True Amazon. The last episode builds to a Norma Rae moment: in a fancy restaurant to celebrate her twenty-sixth birthday, she mistakenly stabs herself with Ilana’s EpiPen (Ilana has been stricken by an allergy to shellfish), and, jacked on adrenaline, jumps atop their table, crushes a glass in her hand, and cries out, “Ilana, I got you, girl! It’s my birthday. I’m the king of the world!”
At first glance, Ilana is the alpha (the banana man) and Abbi the sidekick (the feed), but, in defiance of double-act convention, Jacobson and Glazer frequently subvert these roles, big-sis status shifting between them, or vanishing entirely, in part because, in the context of “Broad City,” neither aspires to it. The extent to which their characters are established and yet constantly surprising each other gives their interplay a kinetic unpredictability that may or may not owe something to their background in improv, or perhaps to the fact that they really are making it up as they go along. In real life, neither, it seems, is the dominant one. Jacobson is more confident and shrewder than her character on the show. Glazer is much more resolute. “This feels like a marriage, in the way that marriage is basically a business decision,” Glazer said the first day I met them.
One night, I heard a fan ask Jacobson whether one should say “Abbi and Ilana” or “Ilana and Abbi.”
“It’s Abbi and Ilana,” she replied. The fan looked surprised, as though she’d expected that Jacobson wouldn’t care.
One of the conceits of coming to New York from the provinces is the clean slate. By some combination of design and happenstance, you acquire a new life—new friends, surroundings, habits—that in retrospect might seem the inevitable product of what you were before, rather than the result of a random series of accidents. Abbi and Ilana, on the show, hardly seem to have a past (the Web series contained clues), but Jacobson and Glazer are still young enough so that whoever they were before they came to New York takes up a much bigger share of their lives than whatever it is they are in the process of becoming now that they’re here.
Jacobson is from Wayne, Pennsylvania, on the Main Line, outside of Philadelphia. Her mother is an artist. Her father has a graphic-design business. They divorced when Jacobson was thirteen. In eighth grade, Jacobson was the student-council representative for her homeroom, and each time she presented the council-meeting minutes to her class she found herself doing so as Linda Richman, the “Coffee Talk” yenta played by Mike Myers on “Saturday Night Live.” Jacobson told me, “It became a thing. I was killing it. That was my first taste. I thought, Maybe I’m a comedian.”
“I had a weirdly awesome high-school experience,” she went on. “I was in the jam-band/pot-smoking group. Head scarves and corduroys. We were the ones who wished we’d been around in the sixties.” She auditioned for musicals but never got a role. Her main focus was visual art. Like her “Broad City” character, she was and still is an illustrator. A lot of the art in her apartment on the show, as well as the hamburger drawing she tries to sell in Episode 4 (and which Ilana surreptitiously buys), is her work. The illustration in another episode that she sells and that gets used in an ad for a racist Internet dating site—this one is not.
At the Maryland Institute College of Art, in Baltimore, Jacobson minored in video, making goofy shorts of herself inventing various characters. After graduating, she moved to New York, to attend the Atlantic Acting School, the conservatory founded by David Mamet and William H. Macy. “I lasted a week,” she said. “I hated it. I didn’t like the technique. It was heady and stifling.” She dropped out and worked as a salesperson at Anthropologie in Rockefeller Center. “That was as close as I could get to ‘Saturday Night Live,’ ” she said.
She moved into an apartment in Astoria with a friend from home. (As on the show, the roommate’s boyfriend moved in.) One day, her roommate suggested that Jacobson check out something called Upright Citizens Brigade. “I’d never heard of it,” she said. “I knew no one in New York.”
Upright Citizens Brigade was founded in Chicago by a group of comedians schooled in the improv techniques of Del Close, a beloved teacher and mentor to several generations of comic actors. In 1996, U.C.B., as it’s known, moved to New York, started a training program, and eventually opened a theatre. Among its founders was Amy Poehler, before she joined the cast of “S.N.L.” U.C.B. became a great incubator of talent and a kind of safe harbor for an assemblage of bent sensibilities who might otherwise, without Lampoon pedigree, have been cast adrift in New York.
Jacobson went to a show at the theatre by herself. “I had never seen comedy like that,” she said. “This was exactly what I wanted to be doing. I found my tribe.” It was October, 2006. She enrolled in some classes. After a year, she joined an improv-practice team outside of class in which there was only one other woman. At first, Jacobson thought the woman was Alia Shawkat, from “Arrested Development.” In fact, she was Ilana Glazer.
Glazer has spoken of her life in terms of “B.A.” and “A.A.”: before Abbi, after Abbi. B.A. was mostly spent growing up on Long Island, in the hamlet of St. James, in Suffolk County—“where guidos meet potato farmers’ grandchildren,” as she once put it. The Glazers were neither. Her father sells life insurance. Her mother is his secretary. Ilana spent a lot of time alone at home watching TV. She remembers standing on her tooth-brushing stool when she was four, facing the bathroom mirror, and pretending to teach an aerobics class. Then she realized that her brother, Eliot, and her mother were watching and laughing. Eliot, who is four years older, was a big-time ham, and she followed his lead. They made hundreds of hours of videos of themselves doing kooky dances and skits, under the monikers of KRAP-TV and GBS, or Glazer Broadcasting Systems. (Recently, they’ve put some of these on YouTube.)
She looked up to Eliot and basically did whatever he did. She also followed rules. She was president of her class in eleventh and twelfth grades and in an anti-drug group called the Positive Edge. (“Most women in comedy are ‘good girls,’ ” Poehler told me. Glazer said, “Comedy used to be a bad-boys club. Now it’s the good kids who like after-school activities.”) Senior year, Glazer directed a play called “Puberty,” which won the school’s tournament of plays. This was the year she discovered pot, and sex. Her brother was at New York University, so she applied there, too, and got in early. She recalls a woman telling her, with regard to New York, “Don’t get tainted,” which she interpreted as a warning against liberals, lesbians, and black men. In some respects, Lincoln, her “Broad City” gallant, who is black, is a thumb in that woman’s eye. (He’s also a subversion of some comic tropes regarding black men and white women.) Glazer—like “Broad City” itself—is very much animated by an ardent open-mindedness, according to which you refer to a wedding between a man and a woman as a “straight wedding” and a desire to sleep with a white man as a craving for “pink dick.” In their own puckish way, Glazer and Jacobson proclaim themselves to be on the right side of history. As Ilana says on the show, “Statistically, we’re headed toward an age where everybody’s going to be, like, caramel and queer.”
At N.Y.U., Glazer majored in psychology and worked as a babysitter, but she increasingly focussed on trying to make it on the standup scene, again in the slipstream of her brother. He suggested they take classes together at U.C.B. One day, Ilana choreographed a one-person dance to the Queen song “Don’t Stop Me Now.” “It had this beauty pageant/gymnastics vibe,” Eliot told me. “But she did it all with a big smile across her face. It just captured the funny, sad desperation of this arty kind of high-school performance.” From that they created a spoof variety revue called “High School Talent Show,” which ran at U.C.B. for three years.
They also started a U.C.B. improv-practice team, which they called Secret Promise Circle. Neither of them was comfortable with improv (not that anyone ever really is). But Glazer, at least, had met Jacobson. Eliot bailed. “I remember him always complaining about the air-conditioning,” Jacobson said. Both women were finding it hard to catch a break. “We were auditioning and auditioning for U.C.B. things and never getting a role,” Jacobson said. They were also paying for an improv coach, rehearsal space, and performance space—no way to make a living. “After a while,” Jacobson said, “we thought, Why are we trying to be on something that someone else controls?” Also, they wanted to create something to show their parents, to prove that they weren’t wasting their time. They decided, “Let’s just make it about us!” Jacobson came up with the name “Broad City,” a sly reclamation of an old-fashioned term (“A broad is a full person,” Glazer says), and they began meeting every day in coffee shops around the city to write.
The Web series commenced in late 2009. They pulled ideas from their own lives, from their diaries, their phones, and their everyday experiences getting battered around by the city: the indignities of aborted booty calls, crowded office bathrooms, birthday brunches, and laundry-sex breakups.
Meanwhile, to pay the rent, Jacobson and Glazer worked selling vajazzling coupons and cut-rate colonics at Lifebooker, an online booking service for spas and salons—the model for Deals Deals Deals. Jacobson also had a greeting-card company, which she called Imagine That. She’d fill a bag with cards she’d illustrated—miniature cityscapes, mostly—and walk around to shops selling what she could. In the fall of 2010, AOL commissioned her to come up with new artwork for a branding campaign: money! She quit Lifebooker. Glazer didn’t last long there without her.
When it came time to make another round of Web episodes—what they decided to call a second season—they resolved, in the spirit of fake-it-till-you-make-it, to become more professional, to act as if this little set of shorts were a real TV show, in the hope that it might actually become one. They produced an episode every week, stuck to a production schedule, cooked up some P.R., and even started paying people.
In November, 2010, Eliot Glazer was talking to a friend named Samantha Saifer, who, at twenty-eight, was getting started as a talent manager. He told Saifer about his sister. Glazer and Jacobson had done sixteen episodes of the Web series at this point. “It was such a pleasure to see myself accurately represented, as a woman—someone who would smoke weed but wasn’t a stoner,” Saifer said. She took on Glazer and Jacobson as clients. Immediately, the three began talking about turning “Broad City” into a TV series, working on what a thirty-minute version of an episode would be like. Saifer took the Web series around, but nobody was interested: “I had one agent, a woman, tell me, ‘I don’t get why we’d watch this. Are they going to get married?’ ”
In the meantime, Jacobson and Glazer, about to shoot what they hoped would be the final Web episode, fantasized about having a splashy celebrity guest. A teacher at U.C.B. put them in touch with Amy Poehler, who, it turned out, was a fan. She agreed to a cameo. All told, the thirty-three Web episodes had garnered half a million hits. The last episode, with Poehler, got almost seventy-five thousand.
Afterward, they asked her if she would be the executive producer of a TV version, and she agreed. Poehler’s name and support changed everything. There are hundreds of Web series, but here was a foundling with a fairy godmother. FX, the home of “Louie,” commissioned a pilot. They flirted with naming their characters Ali and Eliza, or Carly and Evelyn. Abbi/Ali/Carly worked in a coffee shop and had a neighbor named Miss Kragg, who maintained a tenants’ bulletin board called Kragg’s List. But after six months FX passed.
Around that time, Comedy Central hired a new development executive named Brooke Posch. Poehler, who knew Posch from their days together at “S.N.L.,” took her out for congratulatory drinks and told her about “Broad City.” Then Poehler, Glazer, and Jacobson came to Posch’s new office: her first pitch. “The chemistry was sitting there right in front of me,” Posch said. “Usually, you get a script and have to work so hard to cast it.”
“Transferring a Web series to TV is like an organ transplant,” Poehler told me. “You have to move fast. You have to keep it on ice and be careful not to harm it in any way. A lot of things can go wrong. Sometimes the best way to get a heart or a kidney to a recipient is to get people to move out of the way.”
Even with a real budget, and a somewhat conventional structure, the TV version managed to retain the tousled D.I.Y. spirit of the Web series. “Friends” this was not. Jacobson and Glazer persuaded Comedy Central to use writers who had less experience. The network hired a showrunner, Tami Sagher, but during the course of the season, as Jacobson and Glazer acquainted themselves with the peculiar rituals and unremitting schedule of producing a TV series, they began to feel that they ought to be in charge themselves. Sagher said, “I was brought in to help them get up ‘show mountain,’ as Poehler likes to say. At first, even the idea of hiring other writers was off-putting to them. Sentimentally, it was always their show. I was kind of an ombudsman between their voice and TV world. And they totally got it.”
“I pretty quickly got a sense of how they were as producers and writers and how much drive and ambition they had,” Kent Alterman, Comedy Central’s head of original programming, told me. “They have that chip, the one that’s wired for success and hard work.” One feature of that chip, it seems, is an expedient sense of writers’-room politics. When it came time, this winter, to staff up for Season 2, Sagher was not in the mix. “Abbi and Ilana run their own table now,” Posch said. “We’re giving them the reins. Their voices are specific, and they really didn’t want anyone above them telling them what to do.”
“It’s a big deal that they’re letting us do this,” Glazer said. “We’re conscious of not pushing deadlines. We even sent a script in early.”
“They are mini-moguls,” Sagher said.
One writer they didn’t bring in, for either season, was Eliot Glazer. Before Abbi and Ilana, there was Eliot and Ilana, intimate collaborators since the days of KRAP-TV. Eliot had made a cameo in Ilana’s own Web series, “Chronic Gamer Girl,” and she’d appeared in some of his stuff, such as the viral sensation “Shit New Yorkers Say.” (“Is that Pat Kiernan?”)
“I wanted to write for the show,” Eliot Glazer told me. “Comedy Central had suggested me, too. But I think Ilana thought it would be too close for comfort.” He was having a bad year—he’d broken up with his boyfriend and had lost his job as a blogger. He coveted the writing credit, and the money. “I had more to gain than she had to lose,” he said. “It was a source of tension for a while.” Ilana, it seems, didn’t like the idea of having her older brother and mentor in the writers’ room with her. But Ilana and Eliot still get along—“We’re closer than ever before,” he said—and have continued to do projects together. For one thing, he has an upcoming appearance on “Broad City” as himself. And he now has a job as a writer on “Younger,” Darren Star’s new show.
“The whole show has been a rocket ship,” Ilana said. “Only Abbi and I know what it feels like. And it has separated us a little from our lives. But we understand what ‘Broad City’ is, and that’s Abbi and me.”
Glazer and Jacobson spent most of their waking hours this spring writing in a conference room in the I.A.C. Building, in Chelsea, where Jax Media, the production company behind “Broad City,” rents space. They’ve been known to sleep there. “It’s so annoying, not being invincible,” Glazer said. “If only we didn’t need to sleep.” They work really hard. They are in that phase of having time for little else. They seem to spend a lot of time composing and parsing to-do lists. “Our schedule is prohibitive,” Glazer typed in an e-mail one afternoon, putting some supplicant off for a few months. (Jacobson, looking over Glazer’s shoulder, said, “Oh, my God, you’re so formal.”)
With Saifer, they maintain a list of goals, both short- and long-term, and go over it each week. They are understandably coy about these. “It’s not like ‘Take over the world,’ ” Saifer said. “It’s more like ‘Get “Broad City” to air on television.’ ” They are spending their Sundays working on a screenplay that they won’t talk about. “If all we did was write ‘Broad City,’ we’d kill each other,” Jacobson said. They see themselves as a writing and performing duo with horizons that extend well beyond “Broad City,” and they cited certain acting pairs as models: Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks, Seth Rogen and James Franco. It was hard to tell, as it often is, whether they were serious. Comedy partnerships often end in divorce (Martin and Lewis), or at least in conscious uncoupling (Nichols and May), amid the inevitable asymmetries of input, credit, commitment, attention, ambition, and pay. The foundation cracks before the façade does. As of now, the foundation seems stable.
Jacobson and Glazer do not live together and never have. “We can’t,” Jacobson said. “It’s too much.” As on the show, when they’re not together they communicate via video chat. Jacobson lives in Brooklyn Heights, on the top floor of a house. She moved there a year and a half ago, from the West Village.
Glazer lives in Alphabet City, in an apartment with a deck and a roommate, Matt Stopera, whom she met the first week of college and has lived with since then. They moved from South Slope, in Brooklyn, two years ago, over her objections, so he could be closer to the offices of BuzzFeed, where he composes such posts as “55 Things That Deserve a Special Place in Hell” and “40 Pictures That Will Give You Douche Chills.” Glazer and Stopera both have boyfriends but prefer to live with each other. Glazer’s is named David Rooklin; he is a scientist doing postdoctoral work in molecular modelling at N.Y.U. I met him backstage at a Hannibal Buress comedy night in Williamsburg, where Jacobson and Glazer were guest performers. A trim clean-cut white man in his thirties, with glasses, Rooklin wore green cords, green sneakers, and a blue crewneck. “By going to see their live shows over the years, I’ve gotten an idea of the core facet of their movement,” he told me. “If you remove the divide between performer and audience, you have something else. It’s like a collaboration.” I’d hoped to hear more, to try to understand what he meant by “movement,” but a couple of days later Glazer told me she didn’t feel comfortable with me talking to him.
She and I were wandering through Chelsea Market. Glazer was on lunch break from the writers’ room. She stopped at a grocer’s for some peppers and other veggies, which she loaded into a sack. She likes to cook and to work out, but finds very little time these days to do either. In my presence, she was reserved, thoughtful, solicitous. She said hello to people—a guard by an elevator, a man stacking pineapples—and ran ahead to open a door for a woman pushing a stroller. She told the woman seating us for lunch that she admired her earrings, and the woman, blushing, explained that they were cufflinks—family heirlooms. “Good job, dude,” Glazer said. She got preoccupied by a preteen girl who was having lunch with her parents next to us, and who was quietly crying. She often notes children, dogs, and old people when they walk by. Willa Paskin, in Slate, compared her to Bill Murray, for the combination of deep-seated kindness and insouciance, devil-may-care mixed with we-are-all-God’s-creatures.
She says that she wants women to like her. “Men, I don’t care.” Her best friends, besides Abbi, tend to be gay men—her brother, her roommate, her friend Inti, who is an inspiration for her roommate Jaime on the show, and with whom she sometimes takes psychedelic mushrooms in order to hash out the big questions. She can get melancholic. The death of her grandparents is a cause of lasting grief, and she can’t really listen to Bob Dylan or the Beatles without crying. She takes antidepressants. “I’ve never seen her mad once,” Stopera told me. At home, the two of them like to hang out side by side on the couch with their laptops—TV tuned to “The Simpsons” or the Home Shopping Network or the nightly news on WPIX. Bedtime is eleven. She smokes pot every day. She Instagrammed a photo of her vaporizer on her birthday, and threw a 4/20 party on April 20th. Her parents were there. “My father cracks up at the word ‘blunt,’ ” she said.
“I was nervous,” Jacobson said. “I don’t usually smoke in front of parents.”
On the first Wednesday in May, Jacobson and Glazer submitted their finished draft of Season 2, Episode 8, to the network. Eight down, two to go. The next morning, they were due at a table read—a run-through with some of the cast members and Comedy Central executives—of Episodes 5, 6, and 7. “Just when we get the hang of it, the season’s over,” Jacobson said.
Glazer and Jacobson were the last to leave the writers’ room, at a little before 8 P.M. Glazer, in black tights, short jean shorts, a white-flecked black sweater that I recognized from the show, and black-and-white Comme des Garçons high-tops, wheeled her bicycle along the sidewalk, while Jacobson, in tight dark bluejeans and a black knit pullover with intentional mothy holes in the shoulders and arms, walked alongside, carrying a cake box in a bag. The cake was for a fan named Dara Barlin, who had posted a video on YouTube inviting Glazer and Jacobson to come to her “chemo karaoke” birthday party. Barlin, an avid “Broad City” fan, has breast cancer. They couldn’t make it to chemo karaoke—they had writing to do—but they’d invited Barlin to attend a performance of theirs that evening.
Once a month, Jacobson and Glazer host “Broad City Live,” a stage show at the U.C.B. Theatre, in Chelsea. Saifer had encouraged them to do this, in spite of their heavy workload. It allows them to maintain a connection to the scene there, even though they are, in many respects, U.C.B. dropouts. They often call in other comedians to help. Sometimes there are themes. One was “stoned sleepover”: they had guests who could handle, or thought they could handle, getting high before performing. Another was an uncharacteristically frat-boy-ish stunt called “power hour”: they did a shot of beer every minute and proceeded to get plastered. (They aren’t drinkers.) Glazer said, “We’re inspired by the old line about comedy: ‘Dig yourself a hole and then get yourself out of it.’ ” Recently, they’d handed out envelopes to the audience and had everyone self-address them, so that Jacobson and Glazer could mail each person a letter. They wound up with more than two hundred to write. They split them up but are still way behind. Jacobson has tended to write niceties like “I just want you to know you’re so special,” whereas Glazer has fooled around with checklists and multiple-choice gags. She said, “I’ve drawn penises and then an arrow to where I wrote ‘Abbi’s.’ ”
For this installment, they’d hardly had time to come up with something, and they were due at the theatre in an hour. They went to a Thai restaurant on Eighth Avenue, to get dinner and work up a few bits. “Usually we don’t operate like this,” Jacobson said.
The only other diners were two sharply dressed young women. “Oh, my God!” one said.
“What?” the other said.
“It’s Abbi and Ilana!”
“What’s up?” Glazer said, walking up to say hello.
“I’m from L.A.,” the first one said to Glazer. “I never get starstruck. I mean, I saw Angelina Jolie the other day and was like, whatever, but, I mean . . . Oh, my God. You guys are awesome.”
“It’s happening more and more lately,” Ilana said afterward. (In Chelsea Market, a woman carrying a yoga mat had stopped her to say, “Can I just worship you for three seconds?” You might say they are going through fame puberty—the awkward stage.)
They sat down to work up the bits. The first would be a set of micro-impressions: impersonations so brief and distilled as to be absurd.
“One of mine is Natalie Merchant,” Glazer said. She sang, froggily, “ ‘Thank you, thank you.’ That’s it.”
“O.K., so you have John Travolta, too.”
“You do Titanic lady. And the lead singer from Smash Mouth. And Barenaked Ladies.”
“I could do a pug. That is so stupid I shouldn’t even practice it, I should just do it.”
“A pug’s great.”
“An excited pug,” Jacobson said. “I’m going to be sorry I’m doing that one.”
Glazer shook her shoulders and made a horrible screeching sound. “I’m AOL, from the nineties.”
“I mean, how many do we need?”
“Seven, I think. Seven each.”
When they finished sketching out their micro-impressions, Jacobson copied out the list three times, once each for her and Glazer and once for the stage manager. When they perform onstage, they often seem to do so holding a cheat sheet. Far out as it can be, “Broad City,” on TV, is polished and tight. “Broad City” onstage is rough and loose. The main attraction seems to be the two of them just being themselves, tossing around lighthearted banter, expressing admiration for each other’s jokes, doing funny voices, and bobbing about, to music real or imagined. They have the list but no script. The show demonstrates how their success as a duo relies in large part on the extent to which their natural interplay appeals. Sometimes they are like bridesmaids giving one of those dual wedding toasts: paper in one hand and microphone in the other, taking turns, laughing at each other’s lines, dauntless in the service of rough material. It can come across as mailing it in. Their fans don’t seem to mind.
After a while, they gathered up their things and headed for the theatre. “This is where we get nervous—when we see the people waiting in line,” Jacobson said. Near the door, a few women at the front of the queue, upon seeing them both, began screaming “Ilana!” with such hysterical enthusiasm that it felt almost facetious. But it wasn’t. “That was weird,” Glazer said as they walked downstairs into the theatre.
In the agreeably shabby refuge of the greenroom, Jacobson fixed her bangs, and Glazer brushed her teeth, rubbed some moisturizer into her face, teased out her semi-’fro, and got rid of her sweater; now, with a tight gray T-shirt tucked into the jeans shorts, she assumed the coiled verve of a roller-derby contestant. She had peeked out through the curtain. She said to Jacobson, “Those girls that were screaming: They’re freaking me out. They’re in the front row.”
Eliot Glazer walked in. He and his sister embraced. He had on Bermuda shorts and a gray sweatshirt with a terry-cloth yellow smiley face affixed to the chest. “Can I touch it?” Ilana asked. The three of them then huddled to try hastily to devise a routine in which Eliot, a surprise guest, would appear onstage, sing “Happy Birthday” to Barlin (Ilana: “I think you should do a lot of trills, just Aguilera it out”), and—his idea—take a bite out of the cake before handing it over to her. He had a fork.
Their other guests arrived: Arthur Meyer, a thirty-year-old writer for the “Tonight Show,” who changed into black pants, white shirt, and black bow tie for a routine as the Happy Rapping Waiter; Phoebe Robinson, a twenty-nine-year-old comedian whose standup act featured many jokes about having a white boyfriend and one keeper about how her real hair, growing in under her weave, was “reverse-gentrifying my head”; and the actress Natasha Lyonne, in black short shorts, tights, and a leather jacket, with two packs of cigarettes in her right hand and a curious expression on her face that managed to make her seem both wary and wry. Jacobson and Glazer had recently met and fallen in love with her during a mutual appearance at a live talk show in Brooklyn. In some respects, Lyonne is a proto-Ilana: a groovy, impulsive sprite. (“There should be a word that’s the opposite of ‘Schadenfreude’ to describe the way I felt when I heard that the ‘Broad City’ girls and Natasha were working together at U.C.B.,” Poehler told me.)
Jacobson and Glazer had decided to play the “fuck/marry/kill” parlor game with Lyonne (you name three people and choose whom you’d do which to, if you had to/could), except they’d make it a quiz, with right and wrong answers. Warren Beatty/Al Pacino/Jack Nicholson. Daniel Craig/Idris Elba/Barack Obama. Gandhi/Martin Luther King/Mother Teresa.
The show began with Abbi and Ilana bursting out from behind the curtain and dancing to “Started from the Bottom,” by Drake, in the style of the Fly Girls. Both are good and spirited dancers—Glazer is something of an acrobat, and Jacobson’s endearing level of commitment makes up for her not being one. (Part of their shtick is that Abbi has the ass and Ilana the tits. Ilana is obsessed with the former, and the latter are as integral to her act as her mass of curly hair and her way of saying, “Yeezus.”) This went on for a while, the audience going nuts, until the song ended and they bent over, panting. “Welcome to the portion of the show where we catch our breath,” Ilana said. White girls playing black, exuberance for its own sake, the bravado of ironical self-congratulation: it can leave some viewers cold. But not this crowd, whose indulgence, even in the dead-air stretches, had a feverish edge.
Jacobson and Glazer did their micro-impressions. Jacobson got down on her elbows and knees and pounced around like a pug, discovering that, much as a politician should never put on the hat, a comedian, even in the service of laughs, should perhaps never put on the pug. But fearlessness is all. Natasha Lyonne came out: pandemonium. The three of them sat in three chairs as though on a panel and commenced their round of fuck/marry/kill. Pacino/Nicholson/Beatty had Lyonne in a fix. “This is actually stressful,” she said. (Even after the show, she was still mulling her choices. “I could meditate on this for days,” she said. “Would I fuck Lou Reed? Would I fuck Johnny Thunders?”)
When the show was over, the house emptied. The crowd for the follow-up act was thin. On the street, Jacobson and Glazer were beset by their fans. The screamers from earlier kept running up to Glazer and shouting out favorite scraps of dialogue—“Rotisserie chicken!” “Sandwich shop!”—and then laughing maniacally. They were clearly very high. Glazer gave herself over to them for photographs and manhandling. She is generally, like her character, intrepid around strangers, but this had a slight air of menace. Jacobson posed with some other fans and kept casting a wary eye in Glazer’s direction. A woman dressed in men’s clothing got Glazer to jump on her back, for a photograph of her riding piggyback. A garbage truck making a turn on the street backed up toward them and suddenly seemed on the verge of plowing them down.
And then they met Barlin, who stood off to the side with a “Broad City” cap on her bald pate and a “Dolly Parton for President” T-shirt. She was there with her girlfriend, who goes by the name Bevin Branlandingham. As Branlandingham filmed, Barlin enlisted Abbi and Ilana to accompany her in an impromptu version of Pat Benatar’s “Hit Me with Your Best Shot.” The “Broad City” girls gave it their all. Jacobson air-guitared the solo, but opted not to falsetto the notes, and the performance petered out. Then they stood and talked quietly for a while. Afterward, Glazer was crying. “That was crazy,” she said. She unlocked her bike, but before pedalling out into traffic she waited to make sure that Jacobson was safely in a cab back to Brooklyn. ♦
